ABSTRACT
We have observed that people giving speeches, staging the Moving China Award, and formulating marketing campaigns aim to evoke kama muta in order to motivate people to do something. The psychological propensity to kama muta is a necessary condition for this: the emotion is a cause of these activities. Does this give us any hints about the other cultural practices considered in this book? Why do people engage in cry dates, recovery and support groups, social service volunteerism, and vocations, sports, and fandom? Why do people tell and listen to stories in which loving protagonists struggle to be reunited? There can be no one answer – people have multiple, and more or less distinct, motives for doing each of these things, people differ in their motives, and motives change over time. But clearly the opportunity to experience kama muta is a major attraction – sometimes the major attraction – that draws people to them. This delightful emotion makes participation worthwhile, sustaining participants through the inevitable intervals that intervene between the peak emotional moments (when supplementary motives may also help sustain participants’ engagement). Each instance of the emotion is momentary but evokes more enduring devotion and commitment to the social relationships involved in the activity – and induces people to ardently seek to re-engage in the activity in order to re-experience the emotion. Consequently, this emotion appears to be crucial to the sociocultural reproduction and diffusion of these activities, and hence their prevalence worldwide. The emotion also seems to shape the cultural evolution of these activities, such that variants that most strongly evoke the emotion spread most rapidly, attract the most adherents, and motivate the most avid participation (see Chapter 17). In other words, to a considerable extent, it seems likely that all of these activities have become pervasive practices because they evoke the emotion. People do these things partly – sometimes primarily – in order to experience kama muta. People are only partially aware of this motivation, and can’t always 134readily name the emotion, but if you ask they can usually tell you about the wonderful feeling of it.
